


crème glacée au soleil

by recoveringrabbit



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, FSKissPrompt, FSKissPromptCollection, Fluff and Angst, Paris - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-04
Updated: 2016-03-04
Packaged: 2018-05-24 16:04:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6159013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recoveringrabbit/pseuds/recoveringrabbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Fitz discovers his two favorite flavors in the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	crème glacée au soleil

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: sticky ice cream kisses, sitting on a bench in the park and laughing against each other’s lips.
> 
> I kept it within bounds, I swear—the next one will be shorter!

“It’ll be a few hours,” he says after he hangs up.

She lifts her face to the sun, closing her eyes against the glare. “Why?”

Shoving his hands into his pockets, he leans one hip against the stone planter she’s perched on and takes advantage of the moment to chart another constellation of freckles across her face. In the golden Paris glow beaming from above and bouncing off the pavement of the courtyard the thin layer of make-up she wears these days barely serves as camouflage. He’s glad of it. The small brown dots tell him the clouds are lifting. “Did you put on suncream?”

“Don’t begrudge me the sun, Fitz.”

“Um, they needed the plane for something urgent. Thought we’d be longer in our consult.”

She huffs a little and leans back on her hands, digging her fingers into the dirt. “Honestly. Doctor du Breton is an expert in her field but there’s only so much can tell us about ours.”

“Anyone could have known that.”

“Did they want us to find our way back?”

He shakes his head, realizes the gesture is pointless, and tries again. “That’d be slower. Mack said they’re on their way.”

“A few hours.” She hums thoughtfully. “Pity, since we can’t begin work until we’re in a secure location. What are we to do in the meantime?”

Classic Jemma—in the center of a city jammed to the gills with culture and history and all she can think about is the prospect of a project. Even more than her freckles, he’s glad to see her curiosity come back. Slowly but surely she is regaining herself, and that is infinitely the most important thing. “Well,” he says, “we are in Paris. I think we can find something to keep busy.”

“I’ve got an idea.” She sits up and smiles, brushing the dirt off her hands before holding one out to him so he can help her hop down. “It won’t take hours, but you’ll like it.”

“The Metro?” he asks, dropping her hand as soon as she’s on her feet again.

Something like a shadow passes over her face, despite the fact that the sun is as bright as ever. “Ugh, no. We’ve got time. Let’s just walk.”

Not relishing the prospect of delving into the grim excuse for an Underground, he readily agrees and they meander for quite some time along the banks of the Seine. He has no idea where they’re going, nor does he care. The weather is beautiful, there are no impending disasters, and Jemma is walking with a lightness to her step he hasn’t seen in what is probably literal years. There have been hundreds of times he has doubted they could have even this much peace. Maybe that’s why, when she grabs his hand so they don’t get separated in the crush of people crossing a bridge, he lets her keep holding it after they return to solid ground.

Eventually he sees the towers of Notre Dame looming ahead of them, their Gothic sturdiness a marvel of medieval engineering. The Dark Ages, he scoffs, as if any period that built that beauty could be without artistry. “Are we going to the cathedral?” he asks, swinging their hands a little between them.

“No. At least, we can later, if you like, but that wasn’t my idea.” She cants her face toward him, her mouth tipping into a smile at the exact same angle. “You’re desperate to tell me about the calculations required for flying buttresses, aren’t you.”

“They’re a technological feat,” he says, pretending petulance but secretly ecstatic at the combination of smile and assumption. He _had_ been doing the maths in his head.

“Just a bit further.”

They pass the cathedral and cross one more bridge to wander through what looks like another ordinary shopping district, chock-full of tiny shops and sidewalk cafes. It must be food of some kind, he thinks, imagining a crepe stuffed with chicken or, better yet, Nutella and feeling his stomach snap to attention. Smells he hadn’t noticed before start mocking him as they pass café after café. “Jemma,” he says after the sixth one, “where are we—”

She comes to a stop so suddenly he nearly rams into her. Across the street, a queue wraps around the corner of a yellow building, stretching several storefronts past the black awning that spans the angle. Jemma pulls the corners of her mouth in and drops her gaze to the cobblestones. “I didn’t anticipate so many people, but I should have taken the weather into consideration. We don’t have to.”

But he has craned his neck enough to locate the swinging wooden sign and he yelps in glee. “Ice cream! Jemma, you’re properly brilliant. Properly.”

Her bottom lip does that thing where she’s trying to keep it steady and can’t quite manage it. “It’s Berthillon. _World-famous_ ice cream.” Her forehead furrows a bit as he tugs her to the end of the queue. “How did you know?”

“It says on the sign.”

“Since when can you read French?”

“Ah.” Now it’s his turn to look away. “Um. I picked up a bit. While you were…”

And just like that the light goes out of her face, the shy half-grin becoming the turned-up grimace that is her only expression he hates. She doesn’t say anything, of course. She never does. They can be fine together, almost happy, and then something reminds them of what they’re trying to forget and it smashes their fragile equilibrium to glass shards. Unwilling to let this moment go to pieces, he tightens his grip on her hand and pulls her a little closer. “But my accent’s awful. Don’t get anything too fancy or you’ll end with, I don’t know, green bean flavor.” He pauses to notice the taut white skin over the knuckles of her free hand. Not enough, then. “Course, _you’d_ probably like that.”

Her eyeroll is almost as good as a smile. “Not as ice cream. Although, maybe a sorbet—”

“Simmons! Bite your tongue. Don’t deserve one, anyway, if you’re going to treat it like that.”

“By that logic, you hardly deserve a body at all.”

He puts his hands on his hips. “I ate a salad last week.”

“Oh, Fitz!”

She proceeds, as she always does, to read him the riot act about all the nutritional benefits he’s missing and how vitamins _really don’t count Fitz_ to which he responds, as he always does, _then what are they for, Simmons_ and it spirals from there. It’s simple conversation. Primary-level stuff, really. But it’s also weightless and easy and almost as though they’ve been visited by the Ghosts of FitzSimmons Past. As they shuffle forward, he feels the tension ease from his shoulders and watches her fist unclench so that he could, if he was brave enough, reach out and twine their fingers together. The sun falls gently against their faces and backs, warming them just enough that ice cream sounds ideal.

He’s in the middle of a story about Hunter she finds at once amusing and horrifying when she takes him by the upper arms, turns him around to face the back of the queue, and steps forward until she is nearly tucked under his chin. His eyes almost cross as he peers down at her. She squints back, the sun in her eyes at this angle. “Code Won-Won.”

“What? Oh—” He peeks a glance over his shoulder and, sure enough, just ahead of them in line two people are engaged in what his Academy suitemate inelegantly called ‘tonsil hockey’. Jemma’s never been keen on public displays of affection. Or public displays of anything, really. Pushing aside the twinge of jealousy, he turns back to her and gulps a little at the sight of her face so close to his. He would never just bend down and kiss her in the street—can’t bend down and kiss her at all—but it doesn’t stop him from resenting people who aren’t cursed and can give into these urges. “Well,” he says instead, “Paris is the city of love. You can’t blame them.”

“Such a curious thing, really,” she says, staring thoughtfully at his collar button. “I always think of Paris as the city of blood.”

“Blood?” he repeats, startled.

“Yes.” She nudges him to move up and he stumbles a little, trying to step backwards to go forwards. “Because of all the tragedies. Think of it, Fitz—the Nazis, the barricades, the Revolution—blood just running in the gutters—”

“But that was a long time ago,” he begins, but she shakes her head firmly.

“Blood stains, Fitz. You know it does.”

He does. Oh, he does. He feels it on his own hands and has watched her try to wash it from hers. Will’s blood, the Inhumans’s, even his, even though it’s metaphorical and he offers it willingly anyway—her hands rub and twist and wring in a near-constant performance as SHIELD’s own Lady Macbeth. Only none of it’s her fault. The blood is on the cosmos’s hands. For the millionth time, he wishes there was a way to make her believe it.

Then she laughs, and it’s small and rueful but not edged with pain, so it feels like a victory. “Or perhaps I’m only being morbid since the first time I visited Paris was just after we read _A Tale of Two Cities_ in school. Dickens’s imagery was rather impactful for a ten-year-old.”

“And overdone.”

“Well, yes, But what do you expect from a man who believes in spontaneous combustion?”

The disdain dripping from her voice is nearly tangible and makes him laugh aloud. Her eyebrows shoot up in a silent demand for an explanation. “Sorry,” he says, shaking his head, “only, with everything we’ve seen, spontaneous combustion is where you draw the line?”

“It’s a scientific impossibility, Fitz,” she protests, her mouth stern but her eyes sparkling, and he makes a point of bracing himself for the onslaught of biology he knows will be forthcoming. Seeing his stance, she shuts her mouth with a snap, the light dimming. “Never mind.”

Instantly, he realizes his mistake. She has become very good at reading him, but very bad at translating—overthinking everything, he diagnoses, too anxious not to press him too much. Once he had appreciated that. Now, he thinks maybe he was wrong. Tapping her arm with one finger, he gives an exaggerated sigh. “Go on then. Explain to me exactly how a nineteenth-century gentleman with no medical training was supposed to know people couldn’t just burst into flame.”

“Never mind,” she says quietly. Then, glancing up slyly through her eyelashes, she adds, “I wouldn’t want to ruin your appetite.”

“Try,” he says, “first, I don’t think anything could ruin my appetite for world-famous ice cream, and second, maybe it will drive some of these people out of the queue and we’ll get to the front faster.”

She shakes her head seriously. “Oh no. We’re going to need the time to pick flavors. Do you know they have tiramisu, Fitz? And ginger caramel?”

Despite the frankly mind-blowing assortment of premium flavors, when they finally get to the counter he orders peach and raspberry for her, with two scoops of chocolate for him. She accepts the cone with the grin that connotes nothing good for his ego. “Goodness, you would think with all these tourists they would be happy to have someone speak the language. That must be why they asked you to repeat yourself.”

“Stuff it,” he says, waving off the money she’s trying to dig from her pocket, “I didn’t learn it from native speakers!”

“But your American accent is so good, it’s just—”

“That’s my own language, at least, I can concentrate on the sounds—”

“I’m just not sure what good it does when they have to have you repeat it four times—oh, Fitz, careful, you’re dripping!”

He catches the melted ice cream with his tongue just before it falls off the back of his hand. For a split second he is more curious about the sudden flush on Jemma’s cheeks than the flavor of this world-famous ice cream, but then the taste hits his senses and the rest of the world disappears. Almost. “Jemma,” he groans, “Jemma, if you want some of mine you’ll have to get it now. There won’t be any left in about two seconds.”

Smirking, she licks a smooth circle around her top scoop. “I’ll take my chances. You may have a bit of mine, of course, if you like.”

As if he would befoul his taste buds with fruit after the glory that is this chocolate ice cream, also known as the best thing he’s ever tasted. Well—he can’t help looking at Jemma, whose lips match her ice cream perfectly. When she catches him staring, the pink tint rises into her face. Tipping the cone towards him, she meets his eyes firmly. “I think you’d like it if you tried it.”

He can think of only one way he’d be willing to try her ice cream and that way is impossible. He can’t. He won’t. But—“No thanks,” he manages, finally. “You know how I feel about raspberry.”

“Your loss.” Then she shrugs, cutting off any response he would have been able to formulate. “Shall we walk some more? To the cathedral, perhaps.”

He doesn’t know what he wants to say, if anything, so he agrees with a shrug of his own and buries his face in his ice cream. A little way from Berthillon the street dead-ends at a wall leading to another of Paris’s milky-stoned bridges, which appears to serve as the shop’s outdoor seating area. Groups of people perch on the ledge or lean over to watch the river, chattering as much as their wide grins and enormous ice creams will allow them. Finding a place at the wall facing Notre Dame, Jemma rests her elbows on it and licks lazily, tilting her face heavenwards once more. Light rests at the top of her head, picking up the highlights no one but him knows she has. He watches, entranced, trying and failing to remember the last time he saw her hair turn to gold. How, he asks himself in wonder, does he always forget how beautiful she is?

She turns to glance over her shoulder, his name written across her face as clearly as if she had said it. He has never and will never refuse to come when she asks, so he shoves his way in beside her and ignores the Gallic insults that follow. In the small space, their arms and hips and ankles touch. The river burbles away below, a quiet counterpoint to the saxophone someone is playing on the bridge.

“You looked very pensive,” she says, brushing her hair behind her ear.

It isn’t a question, but it is. He could deflect it, ignore it, make a joke of it if he wanted, but to his surprise he finds that in this light, in this place, with this taste on his tongue and this woman beside him, honesty doesn’t seem that frightening. “I was thinking about what you said about blood.”

Her nose crinkles. “Goodness, I’m sorry. It was silly.”

“You haven’t said a silly thing in your entire life,” he says, bumping her shoulder with his own, “and anyway, I was thinking you were right.”

“No, I wasn’t. Look at this, Fitz.” She gestures as wide as she can, encompassing the sky and the Seine and the sax and Notre Dame’s spires standing steadily against the blue. “This is beautiful. It’s too lovely to be blood-soaked.”

“No, see, that’s just it.” Needing time to search for the words, he finishes off his first scoop and starts on his second without biting down the cone. This is too important to stutter over. “I was thinking,” he starts again, “that it’s more beautiful for being bloody. Because it—it’s been through it and come out the other side and it’s still this. It can still make you feel like this.”

Her eyes are deep, deep, and shot through with honey. “Like what, Fitz?”

But he can’t answer. Not with words. This feeling, it’s achingly familiar to him in all its iterations, whether sharp like knives or warm like a fire; he knows it so well he doesn’t know who he’d be without it, but he’s never been able to name it himself. Other people have, of course. Only he thinks their words don’t go far enough. For him, it’s only ever had one word scrawled across it: _her_. Not enough for anyone else. Everything to him. “Jemma,” he says, and somehow manages another three words: “you know what.”

Ducking her head, she traces a pink drip with one slender finger. “Do you mean that?”

“Yes,” he says without thinking about it, and then, “ _yes_ ,” trying to infuse every bit of belief and love that runs through his veins into the single syllable. At this moment he doesn’t care if it’s selfish and he doesn’t care if they’re cursed. Later, tomorrow, the rest of his life he might regret it, just like he cherishes and hates the kisses they shared in the lab for giving him a taste of what they could have had were the world less cruel. It doesn’t matter. Right now, she has to know how he feels or his heart will burst with it.

And maybe Paris is magic, after all, because she catches and holds his gaze as she speaks without hesitation: “Fitz, I don’t believe we’re cursed.”

He freezes. He always does in these situations. His mouth drops open, of course, he can’t help that, but—

She brushes her hand down his arm and plucks at his sleeve, the pink rising again in her face as her eyes dart between the people around them. “Can we, um—”

He nods like a gormless fool, clutching his cone as if it is the only thing tethering him to reality. In this moment, it might be; nearly all he knows to be true is contained in the tiny form of the woman he loves, and she has just rocked the foundations of his understanding. Trailing her across the bridge and past the busker, he returns to his ice cream automatically, a crime against this perfect chocolate taste. Neither of them speak until she gestures to a bench a little way past the memorial for the deportees of Vichy France. “Is that all right?”

“Fine.” When they sit, he can still hear the sax wailing away. The song sounds familiar, though he can’t place it—something about trees and roses? He tries to puzzle out the lyrics while he waits for her to speak again. This is the part where she supports her assertion. He can do nothing until she gives him more information.

He’s popped the last bit of his cone into his mouth before she starts, right in the middle as if they never stopped. “Not that I believe in curses anyway, but pretending for a moment that it is possible for the cosmos to have anthropomorphic feelings, even then, I wouldn’t believe it.”

“Okay.”

After a minute, he takes her dripping cone and runs his tongue around the soggy edge before chucking it into a nearby bin, too busy watching her struggle for words to regret the waste.

“I’ve been trying,” she says finally, “to let you keep your distance if you wanted, if you decided I wasn’t worth it—I wouldn’t blame you, truly, but that’s not—that, is, you keep looking at me—”

“I’ll stop if you want,” he blurts out, horrified to think his stupid helpless love might be causing her more pain.

“No! That’s _not_ what I want.” Her fingers twist together in her lap but she meets his eyes anyway, unwavering. She is terrified, and he is terrified, but despite or maybe because of that he has never been prouder of her. “I want you. I want us. I want Perthshire, still. And I think, Fitz, if you agree, we can have it.”

He hasn’t moved, but suddenly he’s breathing as hard as if he’s just finished training with Bobbi. “But, Jemma. Every time we try—”

“That’s not true,” she says, shaking her head firmly and grabbing his hand with her cold, slightly sticky one. “Because we have this, right now. And we had our ten years. And we have each other whenever we need each other. And—and you came back to me, Fitz. If we were really cursed, would that be true?”

He’s been over the counter-argument so many times, it’s basically a rote speech by now: The astronaut. The monolith. The hypoxia. The fall of SHIELD, twice. Their mutual lack of courage. Everything that has ever conspired to tear them apart, all of it leading to one inevitable conclusion. The words are on the tip of his tongue, ready to spill out and dash the hope from her eyes and the sun from the sky, when he realizes three things at the exact same time:

  1. The saxophone is and has been playing _What a Wonderful World_ ;
  2. The words on his tongue are trapped under a layer of peach, raspberry, and chocolate;
  3. He and Jemma are in Paris, together, generally healthy and mostly happy, and she let him pay for their ice cream and she’s holding his hand and telling him—again, still—that she wants him.



He cannot deny it. This is, objectively, a perfect moment. What’s more, it’s a perfect moment happening after, happening _in spite of_ all the reasons he has to believe something is out to get them. Maybe, even, happening _because_ of those things. And then he just knows, like Archimedes and the theory of water displacement: the cosmos may try to curse them, but they can and do break it every day they choose each other anyway. The thing is, he realizes, this would be enough for him. If all they ever get is brief moments of happiness between tribulations of apocalyptic proportions, as long as he can have her sometimes, it would be enough. Slowly, he turns his hand over until he is holding her just as tightly as she is holding him. “If so,” he says. “If you’re right. What do you think we should do about it?”

_Oh_ , he thinks as he watches the sun rise in her eyes, so _that’s_ what it looks like. He only knew what that expression felt like, before. She looks down at their entwined hands, her thumb stroking his and sending shivers up his spine. “For now,” she breathes, and he leans forward to catch every syllable. From this angle, the mischief dancing in her eyes when she glances up again is too adorable to be frightening. “For now,” she starts again, reaching her free hand toward him, “you’ve got ice cream all over your face.”

He jerks back a little, not having expected that at all, and bats her hand away, affronted. “I’m a grown man, Jemma. I can wipe my own face.” Swiping around his mouth, he raises both eyebrows. “See.”

“You’ve missed a spot,” she murmurs, and her thumb brushes across his cheek and he is trying very hard not to remember the last time that happened when, somehow, her lips have come to rest at the corner of his mouth. He freezes again, though his skin feels like it’s burning; her breath is warm but her lips and—oh, mother of all things—the quick swipe of her tongue are cold and sweet. He turns his head to meet her fully and she makes a noise in her throat, holding him firmly in place. “Fitz, let me get it. You ate all the rest.”

“You didn’t want any,” he protests, absolute putty in her hands.

“Mm,” she says, moving her ministrations to his cheek, “I did. I wanted it this way.”

“Minx! You were planning this the whole time?”

Her laugh vibrates against his ear—he’s fairly confident there’s no ice cream there, but he’s not going to argue—and she follows it with another kiss. “Minx, Fitz? What are you, a nineteenth-century vicar?”

He closes his eyes, unable to gather enough words to retort when her mouth is dancing across his face, her tongue darting out tantalizingly every now and again and then retreating with pleased sighs. Instinctively, his hands reach to tug her closer, the one clasping hers more tightly while the other comes up to gently wrap around her neck. She shivers and stops, resting her forehead against his. “Perhaps I should have accepted your offer earlier. That ice cream was marvelous.”

He twists his thumb in her hair, his fingers brushing lightly against the silk of her skin. “Best ice cream I ever tasted. But you’re not being fair.”

“Fair?” she asks, eyes wide in pretended innocence. “What ever do you mean?”

“Now you’ve sampled mine, but I haven’t tasted yours.”

“But I am a much neater eater than you are. How do you plan to—”

He plunges forwards to capture her cool berry mouth and she meets him eagerly, already smiling, the palm of her hand sticky against his cheek as she adjusts the angle and deepens the kiss. Every nerve in his body is singing, his senses overwhelmed with the smell and the feel and the taste of her—the taste, lord, the taste, a hint of chocolate and sugar and summer and _her_ that intoxicates him, as addicting as any drug. He would be quite content to sit there for the rest of his life with only her for sustenance. Had he thought it was a perfect moment before? He was wrong.

At some point, a thought swims up from the deep and makes him laugh into her mouth, disrupting their connection enough that he thinks he can manage to speak. He pulls back, vaguely proud of the slow way she opens her eyes to frown at him. “Why did you stop?” she pouts.

“No one’s coming to kidnap us, are they? We aren’t sitting on a fault line?”

Catching the joke, she allows the corners of her mouth to turn up. “No. And aliens never attack Paris, so we haven’t got to worry about that.”

“Good,” he says, swooping in for a quick kiss and not moving away, “so there’s only one more thing to worry about.”

“What’s that?” she asks distractedly, scratching her nails across his stubble.

“Code Won-Won.”

He feels rather than sees her grin. “Silly Fitz. Code Won-Won doesn’t apply when you’re the one doing it. Besides, I find myself rather addicted to this chocolate ice cream and we haven’t got enough time to wait in line again.”

He turns his head to kiss the tips of her fingers. “You’ll have to make do with me, then.”

She stills, her forehead shifting against his. Then her hands move with purpose, holding his face between them and pushing him back so he can meet her eyes. “Never make do, Fitz. I make do with you like I make do with the sun.”

He thinks back on their day: the sun in the courtyard, showing her true colors; the sun in the queue, warming them as they wait; the sun on the bridge, making her glow; the sun in her eyes, telling him she hasn’t stopped hoping. “Jemma,” he says, everything else caught in his throat. “I can’t—”

“I know,” she says, hoping and happy and radiant. “You don’t have to.”

But he does. So, very seriously, he butts their foreheads together and says, “I think raspberry ice cream might be my new favorite.”

“I told you so,” she laughs, and she is still laughing when he kisses her again.

**Author's Note:**

> If you're ever in Paris, you must do three things: the Musee d'Orsay, the Eiffel Tower, and Berthillon. Their ice cream is utter bliss, even if you're just tasting it the normal way.


End file.
